Chapter 11
We are here considering the possible future of one only who knows the gospel of the grace of God, and we ask, what advantages will such an one possess elsewhere for the attainment of piety that are denied him here? If all that God has done to gain his heart has so far failed up till the hour of his death, that he is morally unfit by his habits or even desires for the society of God and His people, what appliances can we conceive of more likely to influence the will and gain the affections in a prison-house set apart for the reformation of the impenitent? Can the sinner expect to meet, in this supposed place of punishment and consequent reformation, more loving friends to win him by such solemn counsels and tender ministrations as earth did not afford? Does he anticipate daily returning mercies and sources of enjoyment more rich and varied than those possessed here, in order to bring him back to God? Will he possess a healthier body, a happier home, holier society, a more beauteous world with fairer skies and brighter landscapes, or any of those innumerable blessings which have such a tendency to tame and soften the rudest nature? Shall means of grace be afforded more powerfully calculated to enlighten the mind, convince the understanding, influence the will, or draw the affections of the heart towards God? Shall Sabbaths of more peaceful rest dawn upon the troubled heart, or sacraments of more healing virtue be administered? Can retreats be secured where God's Word may be read and prayer enjoyed with more undisturbed repose? Will the gospel be preached more faithfully, and a people be found more loving and pious to assemble for public or private worship? Can a Saviour be offered more able or willing to save, and the Spirit of God be poured down upon the burning soil in more plenteous or life-giving pentecostal showers? Is this how men picture to themselves the place in which they expect to atone for past sins by limited suffering? Impossible! They are thinking of a world better and more glorious than the present;--not of a hell, but of a heaven!
Even if such a place were prepared for the impenitent and wicked, what conceivable security is there that a new mind and spirit would be the necessary result of those new and enlarged benefactions? We must assume that the power of sinning remains, otherwise man's responsibility would cease, and punishment thereby become mere cruelty. If sin is thus possible, then why may not the sinner indulge there in the same selfishness, disobedience, and rebellion which characterised him here? Why may it not be with him as with many a man who loves sin in the low haunts of profligacy and crime, but loves it not the less when brought into circumstances of greater comfort and among society of greater godliness? But should it be otherwise, and the supposed place of future punishment have none of those advantages,--and we are forced by the necessity of the case to assume their absence, at least for a limited period, and to admit, in some form or other, the presence of a dread and mysterious sorrow,--we ask again, on what grounds is it concluded that this anticipated punishment shall itself possess a healing virtue to produce, some time or other, that love to God which, up till the hour of death, has never been produced in the sinner? Men attach, perhaps, some omnipotent power to mere suffering, and imagine that if hatred to sin and love to God are all that is needed, then a short experience of the terrific consequences of a godless past must insure a godly future. Why do they think so? This is not the effect which mere punishment generally produces on human character. Its tendency is not to soften, but to harden the heart,--to fill it not with love, but with enmity. It cannot fail, indeed, to make the sufferer long for deliverance from the pain; but it does not follow that he thereby longs for deliverance from the sin which causes the pain, and for the possession of the good which alone can remove it. It is certainly not the case in this world, that bad men are always disposed to repent and turn to God in proportion as they suffer from their own wilfulness, and become poor from idleness, broken in health from dissipation, alienated from human hearts by their selfishness, or pass, with a constantly increasing anguish, through all the stages of outcasts from the family; dwellers among the profligate; companions in crime; occupiers of prisons; members of convict gangs, till the scaffold with its beam and drop ends the dreadful history. Such punishment as this, constantly dogging the crime which at first created it and ever preserves it, only makes the heart harder, fans the passions into a more volcanic fire, and possesses the soul with a more daring recklessness and wilder desperation. And arguing from this experience, to which men appeal, as if it was truer than the Word of God, what more special virtue will punishment have in the next world than in this? What tendency will there be in that long night of misery to inspire a man with the love of God, whose very character, and whose holy and righteous will, have annexed the suffering to the sin? If the sinner's character is not thereby reformed, and all the while he retains his responsibility,--as he must do on the assumption that reformation is possible,--and if he continues to choose sin with more diabolical hatred to the good, is it imagined that such a process as this, of continued sin accompanied by continued mental suffering, will at any period render him mere meet to enjoy the holiness of heaven than when he first departed from the world to enter upon his new and strange probation? Oh, the more we think of it, the darker does the history grow,--the faster does the descent of the evil spirit become, clown that pit which, from its very nature, seems to be bottomless! If means are discoverable there more suited to gain the end of moral regeneration than any which exist here, let them be pointed out. We have searched in vain to find them in the Word of God, or in the mind and history of man.
Making every allowance for the real difficulties which beset this question, and for the peculiar feelings, partly allowable, and largely the reverse, with which it is entertained, we have no doubt that many have been driven to the extreme of utter disbelief in the existence of any punishment by the bold and presumptuous manner in which they may have heard men consign all the heathen, and all Christendom, with the exception of a very few, to this awful doom. Infants even have not escaped the condemnation of some who, professing to have more orthodox faith than their neighbours, have really little or any faith at all in God, but utter mere words to which--in this case, fortunately for themselves--they attach no meaning. For if they did, what would life be to them, believing that it was possible for their babe, because of Adam's sin, to be cast for all eternity into literal fire? But while we have perfect confidence in the salvation of infants, and of many more, we dare not condemn any. The living God, who alone knows each man, may be dealing in ways beyond our comprehension with the most lonely savage, whose inmost spirit He ever sees, and who is of more awful value in His sight than all the stars of the sky. _How_ the living and omniscient Spirit of God has access to the inner spirit of man, I neither know nor could perhaps understand if it were revealed; nor how He can teach that spirit without the gospel or the ordinary means of grace, so as to bring it under law to God. But when I saw a child (Laura Bridgman) who was born deaf, dumb, and blind, marvellously educated by the genius and wisdom of her remarkable instructor, I could not but feel how grand ends might be accomplished in the human soul by means which before this experience I would have pronounced as impossible;--and it suggested also to me how a poor heathen even, like that blind girl, might be really taught by another person, and be receiving light within, though for a time utterly ignorant of either the name, the character, or the purposes of the unseen and unheard teacher, who yet in his own way gradually was training his scholar for fellowship with God and man.[A] We ignorant and sinful men must confine our judgments as regards others to what is right or wrong in their actions, and that solely to guide ourselves in our personal duties towards God and one another. But as to deciding the eternal fate of any man, that, thank God! can be done only by Him to whom all men belong. When disposed to occupy the throne of the judge, and to scrutinise human character with a jealous regard for the righteousness of God, let us at once do so by summoning ourselves to the bar!
[Footnote A: As an illustration of this, see a remarkable account of a North American Indian, narrated by Brainerd in his Diary, date September 21, 1745.]
This, however, amidst all perplexities we may certainly rely upon with perfect confidence, that whatever is finally decided, and whatever punishment is finally awarded to any, will be in accordance with the perfect will of "God, whose name is love;" so that all the true and just, the good and loving in the universe, will, when they know all the grounds of His judgment, sympathise with their whole soul in His decisions, and see His glory revealed in them. We also know that there will be "a multitude greater than any man can number" in God's family; that they will be gathered "out of every nation, kindred, and tongue;" and this we may hope for, that the number of the lost may be to those who are saved fewer far than the number of those in penal settlements and prisons are to the inhabitants of a well-ordered and Christian kingdom.
But not only are our thoughts of future punishment naturally darkened into deepest gloom by the assumed multitudes of those who will suffer, but also by the nature of those sufferings which we also assume are to be assigned to them. We literally interpret all those images of unquenchable fire and the undying worm, borrowed from the constant conflagrations and corruptions of the offal and carcases of dead animals in the valley of Hinnom, (or Gaienna,) near Jerusalem, and also the obviously metaphorical language used in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, as if necessarily teaching that worms or fire would be employed to torture for all eternity the immortal bodies of the lost. But what if there is to be no such bodily pain? though possibly there may be some kind of physical suffering immediately produced by sin there as well as here. What if the wicked shall be punished only by permitting them to "eat the fruit of their own way, and to be filled with their own devices?" What if, instead of the wrath of God being poured upon them to the utmost, it will be inflicted in the least _possible_ measure, and only in the way of natural consequence? What if the sin which makes the hell hereafter, is, in spite of all its suffering, loved, clung to, even as the sin is which makes the hell now? Nay, what if every gift of God, and every capacity for perverting His gifts, are retained; and if the sinner shall suffer only from that which he himself _chooses_ for ever, and for ever determines to possess? I do not say that it must be so; but if it is so, then might a hell of unbridled self-indulgence be preferred then, as it is by many now, to a heaven whose blessedness consisted in perfect holiness, and the possession of the love of God in Christ, for ever and ever. Let, then, the fairest star be selected, like a beauteous island in the vast and shoreless sea of the azure heavens, as the future home of the criminals from the earth; and let them possess in this material paradise whatever they most love, and all that it is _possible_ for God to bestow; let them be endowed with undying bodies, and with minds which shall for ever retain their intellectual powers; let them no more be "plagued with religion;" let no Saviour ever intrude His claims upon them, no Holy Spirit disturb them, no God reveal Himself supernaturally to them; let no Sabbath ever dawn upon them, no saint ever live among them, no prayer ever be heard within their borders; but let human beings exist there for ever, smitten only by the leprosy of hatred to God, and with utter selfishness as its all-prevailing and eternal purpose; then, as sure as the law of righteousness exists, on which rests the throne of God and the government of the universe, a society so constituted must work out for itself a hell of solitary and bitter suffering, to which no limit can be assigned except the capacity of a finite nature. Alas! the spirit that is without love to its God or to its neighbour is already possessed by a power which must at last create for its own self-torment a worm, that will never die, and a flame that can never more be quenched!
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And yet, when forced to come to this conclusion, especially after reading the Scriptures, which in our judgment but confirm it, and give it the sanction of Divine authority, who can, even then, with his human heart silence a "timid voice which asks in whispers" many questions suggestive of what would appear to be the brighter hope? "Who can limit" (in some such form might those questionings be put) "the resources of God's infinite love and wisdom? May there not be found means, though yet to us unknown, and as yet unrevealed, by which the good shall ultimately triumph over the evil,--when every being whom God has originally made capable of love and joy will at last fulfil His glorious purpose,--when every sheep lost to the Shepherd will be found, and brought with rejoicing back to the fold,--when every lost piece of money with the King's image, defaced, yet not destroyed, will be recovered from the dust and restored to the King's treasury,--and when every prodigal, weary of his wanderings, convinced at last, through self-inflicted misery, of his folly, and remembering a Father, will return to that bosom which never can reject a child seeking there his rest and refuge,--until, finally, there shall not be throughout creation even one sinner, but a mighty family of immortal beings, who, after their terrible experience of the reign of self, shall freely and joyfully accept of the reign of the blessed and loving God? If it is _possible_, must it not be so? May we not, in our darkness and difficulty, rely upon One who, knowing man's fallen condition, yet said, Increase, and multiply, and replenish the earth? upon One who declared it to be a legitimate source of joy to every mother that a child was born to the world? upon One whose love to all whom He has made is to our love as the light of the mighty sun to a fire-fly's spark wandering in darkness?"
"Oh, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood
"That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy'd, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete:
"That not a worm is chosen in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell'd in a pent-up fire, Or but subserves another's gain.
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"So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
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"I falter where I firmly trod; And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar stairs, That slope through darkness up to God,
"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope."
With deep sympathy for all who thus feel the weight and pain of the subject, and who hope against hope, we ourselves are compelled to abide in our first faith. We cannot forget that Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Son of man, who was perfect love, truth, and life, has neither Himself, nor through His apostles, given us by one word the slightest ground for hoping that any man who leaves this world an enemy to God will ever repent and become a friend of God in the next. The whole teaching of Scripture is one with what prudence and principle would dictate:--Believe in Jesus; _now or never!_
Hear, in conclusion, God's Word:--"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.... He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.... He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."
Hebrews ii. 1, 3:--"Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.... How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him."
WHAT AFTER DEATH?
It would be very difficult, I think, to put a more serious question to ourselves than this, _What is to become of its after death_?
All of us, I daresay, know from experience what is meant by thoughtlessness or indifference about our state for ever. There are, no doubt, some who, from having had a godly upbringing in their youth, or at least religious instruction, have always thought more or less about what would become of their souls. Perhaps these thoughts made them uneasy, afraid, or anxious; but still they were often in their mind, especially in times of sickness, or when death came near their doors, or any event occurred which obliged them to think of eternity, and of what might happen to themselves if they were to die suddenly, and appear before God. But there are others, again, who seem never at any time to have had a serious thought about their life after death. They have, perhaps, not had the same advantage with those I have been speaking of, but from infancy have lived among worldly-minded people, who gave the impression, by their conversation and general conduct, on week-days and Sundays, that this world was everything, and the next world nothing; that this world alone was real; and that man's chief end was to labour in it, and for it alone, to make money in it, be happy in it, get everything for self out of it, and, as a matter of hard necessity, at last die in it, and go from it--Whither? Ah! who could tell _that?_--who ever thought of _that?_ To them it seemed that death ended all that was reality, and began all that was visionary. But whether early education is to blame, certain it is that many people do come to this state. They seem stoneblind to the future. Not one ray of light gets an entrance into their spirits from the great and eternal world, on whose confines they every moment live. They think, fear, hope, rejoice, plan, and purpose; but always about this world,--never about the other! To rise in the morning; to be occupied during the day; to buy and sell, and get gain; to talk on politics or trade; to gossip about people, and all they speak or do; to marry or give in marriage; to have this meeting or that parting; to give a feast or partake of one; to fear sickness, and to keep it off; or to be sick, and to try and get better:--all this sort of life, down to its veriest trifles, they understand and sympathise with, and busy themselves about. But what of God and Christ?--of eternal joy or sorrow?--of how a man should live to God, please Him, enjoy Him, love Him, and walk daily in fellowship with Him? What of such questions as,--What shall become of us in eternity? What shall we do to be saved? How shall we obtain life eternal? How shall we fulfil the end of our being? All this--oh, strange mystery!--has no interest to them. These thoughts, or any like these, never cross their mind, perhaps, from morning till night, or from the first till the last day of the year. They may, perhaps, have heard these words, read them in books, or heard ministers speak them from the pulpit on Sunday, and they know that the words have to do with what they call "religion," but never think they have to do with what awfully concerns themselves! They are words, but not about realities; or if they express realities, yet realities which belong to some world of mist, and cloud, and darkness, far, far away--one not nearly so real as this world of their own, made up of fields and barns, streets and shops, sea and ships, friends and action! But what, let me ask, separates us from that world which we think to be so very far off--so very unreal? The thin coat of an artery! No more! Let the thin pipe burst through which our life-blood is now coursing in the full play of health, and where then will our present world, now so very real, be to us? In a single second it will have vanished for ever from our grasp, like something we clutch at in the visions of the night. And where then will that other world be which to many is now so dim and unreal as not to be worth thinking about? We, the same living persons, will be in it--in the midst of all its realities; and with these we shall have to do, and with these only, for ever and ever.
But many people do not _wish_ to think about the unseen future. It is not so much that _no_ thoughts about it intrude themselves upon their minds, as that all such thoughts are deliberately banished. It is with the eternal future as with anything which here gives them pain,--they "hate to think about it." This, of course, arises from the suspicion, or rather the conviction, that it cannot be a good future to them. They have read enough about it from the Bible to make it alarming. At all events, they have no security for its being to them as happy as the present; and so, whether from a fearful looking for of judgment, because of their sins, or from ignorance of the means of salvation, or from unbelief in the good-will of God as ready to save them, the result is, that they voluntarily shut their eyes to, and banish all thought of, eternity. It pains them--it agonises them--to put the question, "What is to become of me when I die?" And the more pain the question gives them, the more they fly to the world, and occupy their minds with its society, its amusements, and even its dissipation and debaucheries, in order to banish care and snatch a fleeting joy. O my brother, if you so act, from my soul I feel for you and pity you! For the sick-bed is coming, and you may be compelled to think there; and if so, you are treasuring up tenfold agony for yourself, by your present off-putting apathy and wilful thoughtlessness. And should you manage, even in the time of sickness, and up to the very hour of death, to shut out the future from your mind; should long and inveterate habit enable you to succeed in the terrible, suicidal experiment, so that you shall die as you have lived--fearing nothing, because believing nothing,--can you avoid entering the other world? Can you prevent a meeting between yourself and your God; or silence an accusing conscience for ever; or hinder Christ from coming to judge the world; or fly from the judgment-seat, and by any possibility delay or prevent a minute examination of your life; or stay the sentence which the omniscient and holy Judge shall pronounce upon you? And if you cannot do this,--and if, rather, every power, faculty, and emotion of your heart and soul must one day be roused to the intensest pitch of earnestness about your eternal destiny,--do you not think it wise, my brother, to think about all this now?--_now_, when there is a remedy, rather than _then_, when there is none?